Food for Thought: Life Kitchen
Three weeks after he lost his mother to cancer, Ryan Riley was left feeling grief-stricken. Intent on cheering him up, his friends persuaded him to join them out on a night out in Newcastle. At one point, the group stumbled into a casino, and in a dramatic twist of fate, Riley placed a £1 side bet and won £28,000. “That’s when my life started properly,” Riley tells me. “Beforehand, my friend Kimberley (who had also lost her mother to cancer) and I were living in a council flat, and we were falling behind on rent.” After hitting the jackpot, Riley was able to make the life-changing move from Sunderland to London.
Fast forward seven years, and Riley, now aged 27, is one of the UK’s best up-and-coming chefs and even counts the nation’s top tier of cooks, including Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver, as close friends. He is the co-founder (along with Kimberley Duke) of Life Kitchen, a hugely successful non-profit organisation that provides free cookery classes and events for people with cancer. The Life Kitchen cookbook was released in March 2020 to help cancer patients recover their taste. More recently, Duke and Riley have published Taste & Flavour, a cookbook to help people who’ve lost their sense of taste and smell from coronavirus.
I meet a slightly bleary but wide-eyed Riley via Zoom, who apologises for his hangover (at the time of writing, the pubs have been reopened for a week, and Riley has been celebrating with the hordes in Soho). As he moves restlessly from chair to sofa to floor, he explains how a working-class boy from the North East (whose culinary upbringing revolved around “Wetherspoon’s and Greggs”) founded Life Kitchen and subsequently became one of the most highly-appraised chefs in the country.
“When mum was diagnosed with cancer when I was 18, I became her primary carer,” Riley tells me. He soon started to realise how the ongoing chemotherapy and radiotherapy was adversely affecting her sense of taste. “Towards the end in Tenerife, when my parents redid their wedding vows, my mum bit into what she thought was an apple, but it was an onion. She couldn’t taste the difference.” Riley soon realised that the vast majority of chemotherapy patients also experienced a change in their taste buds or a total loss of taste whilst undergoing treatment. After his mother Krista’s death from lung cancer in 2013, Riley thought up ways to both honour his mother’s memory and use his cooking skills to help other cancer patients find flavour and pleasure in food again.
It took years of first trying his hand at fashion, food writing, dumpling-making and food styling before Riley realised he wanted to trial the idea of Life Kitchen on Twitter. One night he sent out a drunken tweet, not expecting the subsequent avalanche of messages that flooded into his inbox. “I went viral!” he says excitedly. Sue Perkins and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall were among those ringing Riley up, asking if they could help out with Life Kitchen in some capacity. Realising he had to kick his idea into gear, Ryan and Kimberley teamed up together with Professor Barry Smith, the co-director of the University of London’s Centre for the Study of the Senses, to help develop the recipes.
Working closely with Professor Smith, Riley and Duke began to trial recipes using the five principles of taste and flavour: aroma, umami (or savouriness), texture, layering and trigeminal food sensations (involved in biting and chewing). To test the recipes, Ryan and Kimberley visited Maggie’s Centres up and down the country on what they called the “the refined recipe tour” for those living with cancer. After much trial-and-error, the strongest recipes found their way into the Life Kitchen recipe book and workshops.
Life Kitchen’s standout dish is their “Pineapple Tacos”. The tacos are sliced pineapple rounds stuffed with prawns down the middle with coriander, chilli and lime. The science behind such a recipe is that pineapple contains an enzyme that makes your mouth full of saliva. “When someone hasn’t tasted anything for a while, and they bite into a dish like this, their mouth starts flooding with saliva, and taste can start creeping in,” Riley says. “One attendee, a 75-year old Northerner called Mike Richards, who sadly is no longer with us, was apprehensive about going to the class, but as soon as he bit into the dish and realised he could taste, he started crying. Taste can be so powerful, but until you lose it yourself, you never really understand how much pleasurable food can be.”
Knowing this, when coronavirus struck and millions of people reported a loss of taste and smell, Duke had the light-bulb moment of a recipe book that could help those with the virus. At first apprehensive, Riley agreed with Duke’s idea, and the pair teamed up with Professor Smith once more to start work on Taste & Flavour.
The science behind the book is that it avoids “triggering foods” such as chocolate, garlic and onion (which allegedly can taste like ‘sewage’ to some) and instead uses “safe foods” such as potatoes and oats alongside a “Life Kitchen” twist of flavour and colour.
“As food writers, who start every recipe with onion and garlic, we had to unlearn everything we knew and try to create a different base for recipes.” Riley says. “We found that using miso, mustard, horseradish, mint, white pepper as a base worked well as they are all trigeminal stimulants.”
After testing 300 recipes, the pair finally narrowed it down to the 18 in the book. Recipes include: fiery tomato soup with sesame seed butter toast, smashed new potatoes with miso butter and chilli herb vinegar and lemon and feta and za’atar preserved twists.
I ask Riley about his desert island dish. “I’ll have a cheese and charcuterie board for my starter as I’m more of a nibbles-kind of person. For my main, I would love panackelty; it’s a very Northern dish consisting of potatoes layered with onions, bacon, and corned beef. For my pudding, I’ll have Life Kitchen’s miso, white chocolate berries. Drink-wise, it’ll have to be a can of coke and a glass of champagne.”
Life Kitchen and Taste & Flavour are revolutionary cookbooks that transform food for those being denied one of life’s greatest pleasures. “I think there really is a transformative power of food,” Riley says. “It’s something that can bring people together and lift their spirits. That’s the core of what Kim and I do, what we write and what we cook. We just want people to enjoy life again.”
Ryan Riley and Kimberley Duke’s cookbook, Taste & Flavour, is available as a free download here.
Preserved Lemon, Feta and Za’atar Twists
Makes 4-6
Ingredients
1 x 320g sheet of ready-rolled puff pastry
100g Odysea Greek feta, crumbled
50g crème fraîche
2 teaspoons chilli paste
1 teaspoon chilli flakes
2 Odysea preserved lemons, blitzed or finely chopped
1 egg, lightly beaten
3 tablespoons za’atar, plus extra to finish
For the dip
3 tablespoons full-fat natural yoghurt
1 tablespoon chilli paste
Method
Preheat the oven to 200°C/180°C fan/400°F/Gas 6.
Unroll your pastry onto a baking tray, leaving the baking paper it’s wrapped in underneath. With the longest edge closest to you, use a sharp knife to slice the pastry sheet in half – top to bottom.
In a bowl whisk together the feta, crème fraîche, chilli paste, chilli flakes and blitzed preserved lemons until combined. Spoon the mixture on to one of the cut pastry sheets and spread it out evenly using the back of the spoon. Place the other half of the pastry on top, and cut the pastry sandwich, top to bottom, into approximately 2.5cm (1in) strips to give 4–6 strips altogether.
Holding both the top and bottom of each filled pastry strip, turn one end a couple of times, until you get the signature twist. Return each twisted strip to the lined baking tray.
Combine the beaten egg and the za’atar in a bowl to create a wash. Brush the strips with the wash, then bake for 25–30 minutes, until crisp and golden brown.
While the twists are baking, make the dip by simply mixing together the yoghurt and chilli paste in a bowl.
Remove the twists from the oven, then finish with an extra dusting of za’atar. Serve with the dip alongside.